Overclocking, RAID and System Setup

This content was originally featured on Amdmb.com and has been converted to PC Perspective’s website. Some color changes and flaws may appear.

If you are at all familiar with the Soft Menu III bios screens on most other Abit motherboards, the KR7A bios will fit right in with you. It has all the options you expect in a bios from them. Multiplier adjustments from 5x – 13x and above are included as well as front side bus speeds from 100 MHz to 200 MHz in 1 MHz increments. That is very crucial to a good overclocking motherboard. However, there were a couple problems with the FSB overclocking that I didn’t expect. The maximum FSB that I was able to reach was 161 MHz, well below the top FSB I have been able to reach on other motherboards with and without the KT266A chipset. 161 MHz is definitely not an overclocking drought by any means, but Abit is usually able to get much closer to the top if not take the top spot. There is a slight possibility that the motherboard is a fluke, but from other reviews I have seen, the results seem similar.

The Abit KR7A-RAID sports the High Point RAID controller that supports RAID 0, 1 and 0+1 options in the new ATA133 standard. As Maxtor will soon be releasing some hard drives based on the ATA133 technology, having the support for this technology on your board could be a nice plus. As I always look for, the ability to run the RAID controller merely as an additional ATA IDE controller is available with the HPT372 chipset. Again, feel free to read over our Editorial on ATA133 technology.

The system setup for these tests is just like the others you have seen in the past month. 🙂 You’ll be seeing the Abit KT266A going up against the Soyo Dragon Plus as well as the MSI K7N420 Pro board based around the NVIDIA nForce chipset.

Test System Setup
CPU 1 x 1.67 GHz AMD Athlon XP 2000+ Processor
Motherboards Abit KR7A-RAID
MSI K7N420 Pro
Soyo Dragon Plus KT266A
Memory 1 x 256MB Corsair PC2400 DDR DRAM
Hard Drive 20.5GB 7200 RPM IBM EIDE
Video Card GeForce 3
Video Drivers Detonator 22.40
Operating System Windows XP

Tests:

Quake III: Arena
3DMark 2001
SiSoft Sandra Memory Bench
SiSoft Sandra CPU Bench
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Business Winstone 2001
4 different SPEC view perf tests
Cachemem
ScienceMark
Sysmark 2001

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